Hirokazu Koreeda’s The Truth to open the 76th… | Little White Lies

Festivals

Hirokazu Koreeda’s The Truth to open the 76th Venice Film Festival

18 Jul 2019

Words by David Jenkins

Elegant updo hairstyle with twisted buns, woman wearing black coat and diamond headband.
Elegant updo hairstyle with twisted buns, woman wearing black coat and diamond headband.
The Japan­ese filmmaker’s fol­low-up to Shoplifters will have its world pre­mière on 28 August.

The film world cur­rent­ly sits at the feet of the Japan­ese writer/​director Hirokazu Koree­da. He net­ted the Palme d’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters, his bit­ter­sweet com­e­dy-dra­ma about a mis­fit (albeit lov­able) fam­i­ly of pet­ty miscreants.

He works to the rate of a film a year, so tongues were inevitably wag­ging as to whether his fol­low-up, The Truth, would see Koree­da return­ing to Cannes and set­ting him­self up for an unprece­dent­ed Palme double.

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He, or his peo­ple, saw fit to keep this new one in the cham­ber, and news has now fil­tered through that it’s set to open the 2019 Venice Film Fes­ti­val instead. Koree­da is obvi­ous­ly look­ing for a bit of vari­ety on that already-clut­tered awards mantle­piece. The film is his first to be made out­side of Japan, and he’s man­aged to lure the redoubtable tal­ents of Cather­ine Deneuve, Juli­ette Binoche and Ethan Hawke.

The film will receive its world pre­mière on 28 August, and the fes­ti­val will run through to 7 Sep­tem­ber. As always, your trusty LWLies’ cor­re­spon­dents will be on the ground to serve up the pip­ing hot takes, with rumours of new films by Stephen Soder­bergh, Kel­ly Reichardt, James Gray and Mar­tin Scors­ese already swirling.

Three smiling adults, a man with dark hair and two older adults with blond and grey hair, standing in front of a large cathedral.

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